Minor Arcana · Wands · Number 6
Six of Wands
recognition arriving in public
Element
Fire · will, work in progress, enterprise and drive
The card in tarot
What Six of Wands means
In the Rider–Waite–Smith image
A rider on a white horse wears a laurel wreath, and a second wreath is tied to the staff he carries. People walk alongside with their own staves raised. He is being brought through, not fleeing.
In a reading
Public recognition. The card is about the moment other people acknowledge the work: the promotion announced, the result posted, the applause. Readers often note that the crowd is on foot and he is not.
Upright and reversed
Reversals are a choice, not a rule. Roughly half of readers never use them and read every card upright; those who do treat a reversed card as the same card under pressure rather than as its opposite.
Upright
recognition arriving in public
Reversed
recognition withheld, or wanted more than the work
Reversed, common readings are recognition withheld, a win that goes unmentioned, or needing the acclaim more than the achievement.
The suit
Six of Wands is a Wands card
Wands are the suit of things being attempted. They cover ambition, creative heat, the argument you are willing to have and the project that is not finished yet. Where the Cups ask how you feel about something, the Wands ask whether you are going to do it. The suit is busy: more of its cards show people mid-action than in any other suit.
Fire is not the same as anger, and a run of Wands is not a promise that the thing succeeds. The suit describes energy going somewhere, not the outcome of the journey.
Wands is the suit of Fire, and it is the suit that became Clubs in an ordinary playing-card deck.
The other thirteen Wands
The number
What the Six does
Across all four suits, the Six is recovery, exchange and movement away from the Five.
Six is the answer the deck gives to Five. In all four suits something is given, carried or crossed.
The same rank in the other suits
Why Six of Wands is not a birth card
AsterNym’s birth card comes from adding up a birth date and reducing it, which can only ever land between 1 and 22. Those are the Major Arcana, so no Minor Arcana card is anyone’s birth card and this page does not offer one. The minors are in the draw pool, where any of the 78 can come up.